International Relations

There was a time in the philosophy of science when it may have been believed that scientific knowledge develops in a logical, linear way from observation and experiment to finished theory. This was something like the view presupposed by the founding logical positivists like Carnap and Reichenbach. But we now understand that the creation of a field of science is a social process with a great deal of contingency and path-dependence. The institutions through which science proceeds -- journals, funding agencies, academic departments, Ph.D. programs -- are all influenced by the particular interests and goals of a variety of actors, with the result that a field of science develops (or fails to develop) with a huge amount of contingency. Researchers in the history of science and the sociology of science and technology approach this problem in fairly different ways. Scott Frickel's 2004 book  Chemical Consequences: Environmental Mutagens, Scientist Activism, and the Rise of Genetic Toxicol...